Girl Gone Bad: Esperanza Spalding

Discovering the bass, says Esperanza
Spalding, was like “waking up and
realizing you’re in love with a co-worker.”
Although she moved to upright bass at the
tender age of 15, the 27-year-old winner of
Best New Artist at last year’s Grammys was
already a classical concertmaster with 10
years of violin study and performance experience
in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Switching to bass carried a slightly scandalous
whiff in Spalding’s previous circles,
but it didn’t matter—the appeal of jazz
greats like Slam Stewart, Scott LaFaro, and
Leroy Vinnegar had won heart. Indeed,
even more than her prodigious talent,
heart—her ability to “transmit a certain
kind of personal vision and energy that is
all her own”—is what Pat Metheny once
described as Spalding’s “X factor.”

That certainly extends to her bass
playing. As demonstrated on her second
album, 2010’s Chamber Music Society,
whether she’s playing a 7/8 or 3/4 upright
double-bass, Spalding shows a technical
command that’s as at home with the
colors of Bart—k and Webern as it is with
the ghost notes and broad swaths of sound
that Paul Chambers laid down on “Kind of
Blue.” And then there’s her fretless electric
work, which has an energy and phrasing
reminiscent of Jaco Pastorius on “Teen
Town” and “Come On, Come Over,” with
a loaded lower-mid attack and heavily
syncopated lines that suggest the middle
ground between popping and rest-stroke.

Spalding—a mix of African American,
Welsh, Latin, and Native American ancestry—
is both lovely and instantly endearing.
She’s as likely to express herself humbly as
she is to be firm about her many strengths
and her point of view. That combination is
part of what makes her latest album, Radio
Music Society, such a compelling hybrid
and such an arresting listen. Fusing Afro-
Cuban, bop, chamber music, jazz vocalese,
and R&B with the dizzying chanteuse
streak of her elastic vocals, the album is
shot through with savvy lyrics that take
on real-world subjects like racial pride
and identity (“Black Gold”), the nature
of friendship (“Cinnamon Tree”), and the
price of war (“Vague Suspicions”). And
then there’s the fact that she sings in perfect
Portuguese.

If all that sounds improbably mature
and totally kick-ass for someone still in
their mid-20s, well, it is. Still, given that
Spalding is the first jazz artist ever to win
a Grammy for Best New Artist—and
the youngest instructor ever hired by her
alma mater, Berklee College of Music—it
does help cement the less-than-vague
suspicion that Spalding is something
of a smoldering cross between a Jaco
Pastorius and an Adele.

You began on the violin and upright
before picking up electric bass. How
does the one inform the other—what’s
the hand-off?
Functionally, there are a lot of things
that translate across the two, but the
situations I’ve played electric in are so
distinctly electric. I wouldn’t have tried
to do that music on upright, and vice
versa, so it’s hard to tell. I will say that
things that are second nature for me on
upright, I really need to think about
on electric.

Fretless bass is a very difficult instrument
to play well—you almost need
experience with an upright to do it.
Well, I play fretless partly because frets
defy my capacity to understand. Never
having played a fretted instrument,
the frets just… wow—I don’t know
where to begin on a fretted instrument!
With a guitar, I’m down with that. I
get it: For chords, it helps you stay in
the right place. But on the bass, with
melodic movement and lines, it really
trips me up.

The Fender Jaco Pastorius Jazz
bass appears to be a good fit
for Esperanza Spalding, whose
chops have been compared to the
legendary Jaco. Photo By Carlos
Pericas, Courtesy of Montuno

Why?
It’s a whole different philosophy of being in
tune. If you grow up playing violin, everything
is about how you get to the right note
in time. Then, if you land on the wrong
note, how do you quickly adjust? All these
things really revolve around intonation.
Intonation becomes about distance and
time—how much time do I need to get a
particular distance across the fingerboard?
And your ear guides so much of what you
do when you’re playing a fretless instrument:
So much depends on being able to
quickly hear how close you are to the pitch.

Which instruments are you mostly
playing these days?
For electrics, I’m playing a Fender Jaco
Pastorius Jazz bass and a Godin A5 Semi-
Acoustic 5-string, which has an L.R. Baggs
undersaddle ribbon transducer. The Godin
is really cool—it just sounds beautiful. It
was different for them, and different for
me, so they encouraged me to experiment
with it. For uprights, I play a 7/8 double
bass. It’s the one bass I’ve always used.
Luthiers can’t come to a consensus on who
made it or when, but evidently it was an
orchestra bass for years until the owner
died and the family sold it. It’s just really
alive and really open—super resonant. But
I don’t travel with it. On the road, I just
ask for a 7/8 or 3/4 bass, hope it’s cool,
and go for it.

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